


Scar Maps

by battle_cat



Series: Together [14]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Past Violence, Pillow Talk, Post-Coital, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-22
Updated: 2016-08-22
Packaged: 2018-08-10 08:01:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7836682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is covered in scars, and she mostly doesn’t think about them. But Max has a way of looking at her...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scar Maps

They’re lying on her bed, sweat cooling on bare skin as a nighttime breeze filters in through the window, sated but not yet quite asleep. She’s on her back, legs still sprawled open and smeared with fluids, eyes half-closed under a warm blanket of endorphins. Max lies on his side, his face tucked against her shoulder. Her hand cards idly through his hair while one of his traces wandering patterns over her skin.

He runs a soft finger down her torso, breastbone to belly button, and then brushes over the jagged scar that starts just below her left hipbone and snakes down her thigh, where a chunk of flying metal had buried itself in her leg some five thousand days ago. 

She’d been so full of adrenaline she hadn’t even felt it until she’d slipped in her own blood. She’d managed to hook her belt around the lancer’s perch in the seconds before passing out, which meant she’d made it back to the Citadel with her driver, which meant she was alive today instead of dead. Imperator Ferrous’s crew hadn’t been the kind to stop to pick up those who fell behind.

Max’s index finger traces the scar like the path of a long-dead river on a map.

“Missed the artery by half an inch,” she says. 

He hums, and then he leans over and presses a soft kiss against the twisting pink line of scar tissue. It’s so unexpected, so gentle, that she huffs out a surprised breath.

“What are you…?” she starts, but runs out of breath before she can finish. He kisses a different spot, still along the scar, reaching down to slide a hand along the back of her thigh. It’s not teasing, not even deliberately sexual, just tender and careful. It makes her breath catch in a way that has nothing to do with arousal.

He slides down between her legs to get a better angle, but all he does is move his lips to her knee, permanently scabbed over from ten thousand rough landings, in fights and off vehicles, on stone and metal and sand. He kisses her there, his hand cupping the muscle of her calf.

His mouth moves to the sensitive inside of her knee and his stubble tickles unexpectedly. She gasps and puts a foot on his shoulder to give him a playful shove away. He doesn’t move, just wraps a warm hand around her ankle. His fingers curl around her instep, thumb pressing into the arch of her foot. It feels surprisingly, shudderingly good, and she makes a small noise. He does it again, and she catches his gaze flick up to her face for her reaction.

Her feet are, quite frankly, disgusting, even when reasonably clean, rough nails and blisters and calluses, but he doesn’t seem to mind touching them. She doesn’t know if he can feel the old scars criss-crossing her arches, stretched and broken as her feet grew. Doesn’t know if they’re even visible on her battered skin after all this time. She is not in the habit of checking.

Joe didn’t leave marks, not anywhere that would be seen. But there were punishments for Wives who were not obedient, and she had not been.

She’s not sure if Max’s hands can read any of this, and if he understands it, but he leaves a soft kiss on the inside of her ankle.

On his way back up he pauses to press his mouth against the twin puckers of scar tissue on either side of her ribcage. He knows the story behind those.

He’s face to face with her again, his mouth brushing the healed nick above her right eye, the plane of her cheekbone where just the faintest tracery of silver-white lines is visible. She has the sudden urge to curl up against him, and so she does.

His hand strokes over her back and shoulders, then down the line of her half-arm where it’s curled around his neck. He turns his head and presses a kiss into the crook of her left elbow, and then, when she doesn’t flinch, very softly against the gnarled lump of knitted-together flesh at the end of her stump.

She shivers. She doesn’t let anyone touch her there, not unless she needs medical attention, but she hadn’t stopped him and hadn’t wanted to.

His eyes flick to her face, checking in case he’d done something wrong. She swallows and mutters, “Fool,” and tucks herself closer against him, feeling suddenly raw.

She is covered in scars, and she mostly doesn’t think about them. But Max has a way of _looking_ at her that can make her feel sliced open and exposed and somehow desperately needy for him at the same time.

He has scars too, including the one on his hand where her knife had ended up the first night they’d had sex. He’d stabbed her and made her live. She’d stabbed him and almost—no. She can’t go down that road. Can’t make herself press her lips to that one either, or to any of the other marks of violence on his body. He is a hundred times more deserving of tenderness than she is but…she can’t do it. Can’t do anything but lie there curled against his chest with her eyes squeezed shut.

His arms wrap around her, steady and warm. Of course they do. She shudders out a breath and presses her face into his shoulder, lets him cradle the back of her head and brush his lips against the fuzz of her hair.

“Why did you do that?” she mumbles against his collarbone, and somehow he knows that she’s not talking about the kiss she can still feel in the nerve endings of her scalp.

“Mm,” he begins, but then it takes him a long time to answer. “Glad you survived.”

She has not always been glad herself, so she isn’t sure what to say to that. After a moment she decides on the cavalier. “I’m a banged-up old rig, but I can still run.”

“You’re beautiful,” he mutters sleepily.

She snorts.

“Are.” He rests his chin on the top of her head, sounding utterly unmoved by her skepticism.

She is tall and strong and powerful, confident in her own physical competence, and for those qualities of her body she’s been grateful. She can stare down a man three times her size and make him afraid of her. But she isn’t _pretty_. She’s a hard knot of sinew and lethal reflexes, any available calories dedicated to muscle instead of soft curves. And deliberately so. Beauty was danger, so much of the time. 

_Needs a bit of breaking in, but look at that bone structure,_ the slaver had said as he turned her head this way and that like an object to display.

Max doesn’t look at her like a thing—doesn’t look at her like anyone she’s ever met—and perhaps that’s the most disturbing part, that she maybe possibly somewhere deep down fucking _cares_ what he thinks. That some part of her lit up when he said _beautiful,_ even though she is almost entirely sure it’s bullshit.

What in the everloving hell is happening to her?

She should say something. She should tell him he’s handsome (by Wasteland standards, kind of ridiculously so). She should at least say fucking thank you. But once again, she’s frozen and she can’t do anything.

When she finally works up the courage to say something (what, she hasn’t yet figured out) she tilts her head back to meet his gaze and finds him sound asleep, his stupid soft lips slightly parted as he breathes easily.

She sighs and tucks herself back inside the circle of his arms.


End file.
